Bipartisan path is rough for governor, president

The Republican governor, who has espoused bipartisanship and even once famously declared a “post-partisan” era had arrived, is now pushing a nonpartisan solution. The budget concession required the Legislature to place on the June 2010 ballot a measure asking Californians to approve open, nonpartisan state and congressional primary elections that would allow voters to cross party lines and vote for any candidate. The governor and other supporters say this will bring more moderates to a state Capitol polarized by hard-line liberals and conservatives.

“We have to create open primaries,” the governor said Thursday after the Legislature approved the budget package. “I think that you saw very clearly what happened here in these budget negotiations. ... All of this is because of the partisanship. We've got to bring people to the center.”

Obama's approach to bipartisanship strikes some as more calculating than naive. Republican activist Jim Broussard, a professor of history at Lebanon Valley College in Pennsylvania, dismisses Obama's bipartisan overtures as cosmetic gestures.

“So far, Obama has proven very adept at reaching out to the Republicans, patting them on the head and putting a couple of Republicans in the Cabinet,” Broussard said. “The question is will there be bipartisanship on policy, and what we've seen from the stimulus bill is there won't be.”

Steven Smith, director of the Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government and Public Policy at Washington University in St. Louis, noted that a bipartisan style of governing does not necessarily guarantee a bipartisan outcome.

“It's very possible for President Obama to maintain a civil, open approach that most of us would associate with a bipartisan approach, while not achieving bipartisan support for many of his policy proposals,” he said.

Smith added that Obama also runs the risk of a backlash from some Democrats.

“It's not easy because his own partisans will begin to complain – some already have – about his appeals to Republicans when, in their view, it's pointless,” he said.

Polls show most Americans give the president credit for trying.

When a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll this month asked adult Americans if they thought Obama is “doing enough to cooperate with the Republicans in Congress or not,” 74 percent said yes.

When the same poll asked Americans if Republicans in Congress are doing enough to cooperate with Obama, only 39 percent said yes.

Smith said Americans aren't sure what they want.

“For the most part, they want civil discourse, someone who listens,” he said. “But they also want in a president someone who leads. So there is a contradiction.”

In recent decades there have been several major pieces of legislation that passed Congress on bipartisan votes.

John Wohlstetter, senior fellow at the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, noted that President Ronald Reagan's 1981 tax cut and 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty received a number of Democratic votes. President Bill Clinton passed the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993 and capital gains tax cuts in 1997 with Republican votes.